THE WEEK: Dec 5-9.

MONDAY:

Photographing the Dead: The History of Postmortem Photography from The Burns Collection and ArchivePostmortem photography, photographing a deceased person, was a common practice in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These photographs, from the beginning of the practice until now, are special mementos that hold deep meaning for mourners through visually “embalming” the dead. Although postmortem photographs make up the largest group of nineteenth-century American genre photographs, until recent years they were largely unseen and unknown. Dr. Burns recognized the importance of this phenomenon in his early collecting when he bought his first postmortem photographs in 1976. Since that time he has amassed the most comprehensive collection of postmortem photography in the world and has curated several exhibits and published three books on the subject: the Sleeping Beauty series. Tonight, Dr. Burns will speak about the practice of postmortem photography from the 19th century until today and share hundreds of images from his collection.

TUESDAY:

Adult Education: Style & Usage
Adult Education is a Brooklyn-based monthly lecture series devoted to making useless knowledge somewhat less useless. In December, our speakers will discuss “Style & Usage.” The line-up will include: BETSY BRADLEY, “The Case for New-York [sic], Or, How Gotham Was Robbed of Its Hyphen” Bradley traces the decline of compound modification in 19th-century New-York, when the Empire City was endowed with Johannes Gutenberg’s favorite punctuation mark. How and why Manhattan was robbed of this most graceful of semantic helpers is a tale of shame and sorrow. Bring your hand-kerchiefs.

Best Music Writing 2011
The best and brightest music writers join guest editor Alex Ross and series editor Daphne Carr for a marathon reading of some of the year’s most important contributions to music journalism.

EXPERIMENTS AND DISORDERS
present a wide cultural and stylistic range of work, pairing boundary breaking established writers with emerging hotshots to bring audiences a cross-section of cross genre writers distinguished by their highly individual use of language.

WEDNESDAY:

FINAL FOCUS WORKSHOP FOR NATURE FETISH!
NATURE FETISH is a 5-episode opera. Stage 1 of the creation of this work has been 5 open devising and performance research sessions aimed to tear at the heart of “what do we think nature is?” The four workshops have been very fruitful thus far and we are deeply grateful for all of your participation, enthusiasm, ideas, and expertise. We hope the final work will do these workshops justice and will SAVE THE DATE for the ART IS NOT APART festival at University Settlement January 26-28 during which we will be performing excerpted work-being-developed.

MIGRANT WORKERS OR REFUGEES?
Marta Halpert, Editor-in-Chief of Das Jüdische Echo magazine will be giving a lecture entitled “Migrant Workers or Refugees? Popular Perceptions Of Immigration In Central and Eastern Europe” She will discuss her perspective on the politicies regarding migrant workers in Central and Eastern Europe. Halpert will also touch on questions such as whether migrants are viewed as members of the host society or whether they are merely seen as refugees who were forced to leave their home countries for economical or political reasons.

THURSDAY:

Toxic Land
Inspired by Micah Ganske’s current exhibition, “Toxic Land” is a presentation on the topic of cleaning contaminated land. Walter Mugland, director of the EPA’s Emergency and Remedial Response Division who spearheads the “Superfund” initiative in New York, will discuss the EPA’s designation of Newtown Creek, Greenpoint as a “Superfund” site, their investigation, and clean-up plans in the area. Lydia Xynogala will present her research on the topic of chemical landscapes and architectural allotropy. The research explores new technologies for diverting chemical waste into building materials, such as limestone, as well as phytoremediation, the use of plants to absorb or break down contaminants. Lydia is currently a candidate for a Masters of Architecture II at Princeton University.

PLAY STATION
Postmasters has the pleasure to present “Play Station”: a collection of 12 game and play related pieces by 12 digital artists from all over the world. We would call them “interactive”, except nobody likes that word anymore… We would call them “fun and exciting”, but that would sound contrived and corporate… We would call them “post-video-game”, but that would sound offensively academic. So we will not say anything about them except that you can play with them all you want at Postmasters Gallery from December 8th through 22nd.

FRIDAY:

Film + Discussion The Fight to Stop Extreme Fuels: The Keystone XL Pipeline and Beyond
In August, 1,253 people were arrested at the White House while protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. The proposed pipeline will carry crude tar sands oil from northern Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf coast of Texas. “This is a carbon bomb with a 1,700-mile fuse,” says NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen. Martha Cameron and Gary Goff, two of the arrestees, will talk about the fight to stop the pipeline and the political, economic, and environmental implications of the race for extreme fuels.

Tori Ensemble
Tori Ensemble is a world music ensemble featuring Korean traditional artists and American free jazz artists – transcending musical borders through a mingling of jazz, new music, and Korean influences. “Arirang” is a song of love and longing, an ancient Korean folk music taking on various different musical interpretations in each of Korea’s diverse local regions. Tonight’s performance will show the most basic, instinctive…(more)

Big Bands, Little Bands, Aliases and Stress (relief)…set to FILM!The Reverend Screaming Fingers Big Band will present “Music for Driving and Film,” a night of instrumental music set to projected 16mm film images of San Francisco’s Alfonso Alvarez and Thad Povey. NYC guitarists Lucio Menegon (aka The Rev.) and Rob Price (Dim Sum Clip Job) will pair up with SF players John Hanes (Chrome, Victor Krummenacher) on drums, Wil Hendricks (Edith Frost, Lofty Pillars) on bass and Suki O’Kane (She Mob) on vibraphone. And you also get Little Band of Sailors! And Alias Pail! and PAS MUSIQUE!

Fiction Reading–E. L. Doctorow, Introduced by Darin StraussRenowned author and NYU senior faculty member E. L. Doctorow reads from his new book, “All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories” (Random House, 2011). Doctorow holds the Lewis and Loretta Glucksman Chair of English and American Letters at NYU. This event is co-sponsored with the NYU Bookstore.

PERRY BARD Man With A Movie Camera: The Global RemakeThe award winning participatory project, which has been in progress since 2007, invites people around the world to interpret Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man With A Movie Camera for the 21st century. A website at http://dziga.perrybard.net contains every shot in Vertov’s film, while the scene index and tags allow people to select the shots they want to interpret. Software developed for this project archives, sequences and streams their uploads as a film. As each shot can be uploaded more than once, infinite versions of the film are possible. A new film streams daily on the website selecting from the database of submissions.

MONTROSE
Front Room Gallery is proud to present, “Montrose” an exhibition of new works by: Thomas Broadbent, Sascha Mallon, Karen Marston and Miho Suzuki. Featuring artists who were selected to participate in the Montrose Farm Artist Residency, in historic Long Green Valley, Maryland. Invited artists were given two week residencies during June-July 2011 to develop and inspire new works the results of the residency will be exhibited from December 9th- January 1st.

Flatlands: Ross Racine & Olalekan Jeyifous
Skink Ink Editions is pleased to present Flatlands a show exploring digital drawing and its relationship to urban and suburban landscapes and architecture. It is a pairing of artists Ross Racine and Lekan Jeyifous through similar subject and process and a heightened awareness of the artificial in the contemporary environment. Themes of urban and suburban housing, architecture, surveillance, and landscape are examined through the medium of prints that originate as drawings made on a computer.

The Poetry Brothel: Lingua Franca
oin us this Friday as The Poetry Brothel breaks in a new location! The bar at 206 Sullivan (formerly Ciao Stella) is currently nameless and totally begging for us to come and discover it’s true moniker, buried somewhere along the Mediterranean, near the salty edges of the sea. While undertaking this heroic mission we’ll be aided by everything you could want from The Poetry Brothel: live music by Mat Davidson, burlesque from Luna Liprari and Miss Em, tarot by King Mab, magic by Mr. Cooper, live painting by Yao Xiao and, of course, our bevy of syncopated sirens, the poetry whores! In addition, we’re so pleased to announce an underground lair, hung with curtains and candlelight, filled with the sounds of whispered poems, dead languages, and metaphors, leaping fully formed from our minds to live among us in the world, incarnate.

UPCOMING:

Krymov Lab A Story: Dido and Aeneas at CPR – Center for Performance ResearchKrymov Lab presents Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas as an “object-based opera” performed by a company of stage designers led by Vera Martynova. All graduating students of GITIS, the Moscow Theater Academy, the young artists not only devised, conceived, imagined, and created every element on stage but they are also performers and singers.Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas found its inspiration in the Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid and tells the tragic love story of Dido, Queen of Carthage and the Trojan hero Aeneas. Its first known performance was at Josias Priest’s girls’ school in London in 1688, was created for an intimate space, and required only a few instruments. As a consequence, this reimagining of Dido and Aeneas recreates the original intimacy by communicating with the audience in a very personal and direct way: living stage images are constructed and deconstructed ceaselessly in front of our eyes in a montage of real-time sound, technology and performance coming together in song.

CNN DIALOGUES: Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgender:Has More Openness Led to More Acceptance? The LGBT community has a long history of participation, activism, and contribution to the fabric of American culture. Its pioneers have paved the way for many policies enacted in corporate America, on Capitol Hill, and within state and local government- all with the aim to include and respect. Now, more than ever before, we find LGBT themes prominently integrated into pop culture and mainstream media. Is the hit television show “Modern Family” pointing us all in the direction of a new American reality?